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Debian 5.06 installation

Submitted by Peter on Mon, 2010-10-18 00:28

Debian 5.06 arrived during September 2010 and hopefully has improved in the two areas creating problems with earlier versions of Debian. Hardware compatibility has to improve because earlier Debians were too far behind reality. RAID support is the other big area tested during this installation.

Installation

Debian presents a choice between Installation and Graphical installation. Why would you use the Debian medieval 1980s style coloured text screens when you can have a 1990s style graphical user interface? Select Graphical installation then press enter.

Graphical installation [Enter]

Choose language

English
Continue [Enter]

Choose a country, territory, or area

Australia
Continue [Enter]

Choose a keyboard layout

American English
Continue [Enter]

Debian will spend some time installing stuff.

Configure the network

Hostname: r2
Continue [Enter]

Domain name:
Continue [Enter]

Configure the clock

Select a city in your time zone: Sydney
Continue [Enter]

Partition disks

Partitioning method

The choices are shown in the following list.

  • Guided - use entire disk
  • Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM
  • Guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM
  • Manual

We will test the Guided entire disk option then come back and test Manual.

Continue [Enter]

Select disk to partition

Select the first disk, our SSD.

SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 64 GB ATA ARSSD64GBU
Continue [Enter]

Partitioning scheme

The choices are:

  • All files in one partition
  • Separate /home partition
  • Separate /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp partition

Lets test the default of all files in the home partition.

Continue [Enter]

Debian configured the system disk as a 61.4 GB primary partition formatted as Ext3 and a 2.7 GB swap partition.

Partitioning method

We return to this step for manual partitioning.

Create a 60GB system partition on the SSD then fill the remaining 4 GB with a swap partition. Create a RAID partition across the remaining disks.

Debian started creating a RAID 5 array across the three spare disks using the existing RAID partitions but has the disks jumping about in an impossibly inefficient crazy pattern. i will try deleting the partitions and creating RAID arrays from the starts.